The Black Box

Author: Waleed Odeh

In novel after novel, author Waleed Odeh seeks to utilize psychoanalytic theories in his novelistic writing, which is the main feature of his novel "The Black Box." The unconscious plays a prominent role in its formation, in addition to the structure of dreams and the structure of language. Thus, the writing of the novel here becomes an investment of dream images, components of the unconscious, and the regularities of language in its sentence formations and different expressions that aim to search for the psychological components of the unconscious structure of the novel's character. This means that we are facing a novelist capable of representing human psychological life, thus anticipating the scientist. The novelistic scene opens with a man who feels trapped in a dark wooden box, crying for help with no one to answer. At times, he feels the box lifted off the ground, and at other times, he feels his soul moving away from his body, with a bright light before him. From this scene, the novel begins to interpret the event, suggesting that he was rescued from drowning after falling from a bridge in a traffic collision followed by an explosion, and that he was the sole survivor of the accident. This is what the doctors at the hospital to which he was taken told him. Or is it an old memory of his family returning to him in his dreams? Or has his soul inhabited another body and asking him to tell his family where he is? Or have nightmares haunted him, in which he sees strangers he doesn't know, who have settled in his imagination and now control every dream he sees. They take turns telling their strange stories that take place in distant lands he never imagined he had visited before. Or has he suffered temporary amnesia following a car accident in which he lost four of his children and will gradually regain consciousness? Or has his mind created an alternative reality with completely different details and completely real events, filling a parallel life in the world of dreams? Dreams follow daily; as soon as the man closes his eyes, he enters another world. To a story whose events are narrated sometimes by a woman and sometimes by a man. Their features do not appear clear in the dream. And it is unclear whether the protagonists of the woman's story are the same as the protagonists of the man's story or different, as the narrators move in their narration of the protagonist's dreams between different times and many far-flung lands! But what if his dreams were flashes of events, and he was not a narrator, describing his family members? What if the dreams were a chapter from a novel he had read before and was affected by, so it stuck in his mind? And more importantly, what about the black box, is it a real or an illusory box? The new aspect that novelist Waleed Odeh addresses in this novel is his focus on sciences related to paranormal phenomena and cases for which traditional science has not found a reliable explanation. And here is the surprise that the novelist unleashes when he makes us eagerly search, after finishing reading his novel, for the term "astral projection" or what is known as etheric projection, which explains the relationship of the soul to the body and its departure from it, mental telepathy, and the transfer of thoughts from one mind to another, and other phenomena that some scientists agreed with and others doubted...